VMware admits sweeping Broadcom changes are worrying customers
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It's blatant gaslighting.
"We hate this!"
"I'm hearing you have lots of questions about our new policies."
"This is terrible!"
"I understand you're coming to us to better monetize the new facts on the ground."
"There was no reason for this change!"
"In keeping with evolving standard practices and peer-level pricing activities..."
Etc. etc.
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rocketgeekinfl
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
I knew this Broadcom acq was going to be a disaster. How did I know, well for one I made it a point to make sure that not one node in any of my 80+ world wide VMware farms had Broadcom NIC's. Why is that you say, b/c they were responsible for the majority of the purple screens I have ever had with ESXi. Once I switched to Intel or even better Mellanox NIC's all problems related to driver/firmware conflicts went away. But I digress, it is clear Broadcom is only interested in the cream at the top, and will continue to make it difficult for non fortune 1000 companies to use VMware anymore. That is a shame. Good thing their are alternatives out there now.
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We're moving our VMware to Hyper-v now. We already had a few newer VMs on Hyper-v so it was an "easy" choice.
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I hate that more and more companies are going to this model. It just increases more of the cost for businesses and as such, pulls that money from other places. We unfortunately have a product that they only support VMware, and so this royally screws us because now our costs are going to greatly increase. I hope broadcom loses a fortune. I hate that these companies are so money hungry, with executives saying "why charge them a one time fee to own the product, when we could charge them an expensive subscription and get even MORE money!!!"
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It accelerated our plans for cloud and instead of hybrid between private and vendor, we are going 90% vendor cloud. The reason? Broadcom price increases made the spreadsheet lean into the vendor. If you are going to pay a lot, monthly/quarterly, might as well have them run it for you and redirect staff to work that better aligns with project goals.
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Think of all the professional artists and designers out there who cut their teeth as a teen or college student on a cracked copy of Photoshop and have paid Adobe thousands of dollars in licences since.
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Absolutely necessary for lining the pockets of everyone involved in this tragedy before they all jump out the window of the burning building with their golden parachutes on.
Every quote from Shenoy is so mind meltingly insulting to everyone else’s intelligence.
At my work we’re in the final stages of consolidating our VM infrastructure to VMWare after being split between it and HyperV for a long time. Fuckity fuck fuck. We’re a small organization in our sector, and while we have a modest budget, we’re in a bit of a belt tightening mode with a new CFO who’s got a scalpel in hand.
Going to have to start planning an exit strategy on VMWare soon, but I’m going to have to figure out how to do that without buying too much hardware. Thinking I’m probably going to have to buy more storage for my SAN and carve out some LUNs for HyperV or something like Proxmox and then convert a host to the new hypervisor and start vacating then convert more hosts as the workload shifts.
‘Go to VMWare’ he said, ‘we get steep education discounts from VMWare on the software and cheap support renewals’. What could go wrong? Fuck.
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Edubfromktown
Ars Praetorian
I started using VMWare in production when ESX 3.02 was released ~17 years ago.
I don't admin any of it these days but have to say, few product runs have lasted that long in stuff that I've deployed over nearly 4 decades of doing IT enterprise work.
My shop is dumping it in favor of Nutanix for all hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and virtualization in the coming months because renewals happen to be coming due... at the right time!
I don't admin any of it these days but have to say, few product runs have lasted that long in stuff that I've deployed over nearly 4 decades of doing IT enterprise work.
My shop is dumping it in favor of Nutanix for all hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and virtualization in the coming months because renewals happen to be coming due... at the right time!
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I know this will sound like a typical anonymous post with made up information to make it sound like the end of the world, but our quote was unbelievable. They were nice enough to give us a "discount" for the current year (only 3x the current cost), but once we have access to a new budget for next year the price would skyrocket. Our past annual costs for new licenses and support on existing ones was around $200k. The quote we received for next year was just under $4 million.
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I work at a small municipal ISP. We're working on re-negotiating our VMware environment contract now too and it isn't looking good for smaller companies. Yearly rate increases and perpetual renewals are a giant pain in the ass. I don't see us getting off VMware anytime soon, but who knows what next year's budget will bring?
Luckily, I run Proxmox on my homelab, despite the temptation to learn more about hypervisors/VMs from the formerly free offerings from VMware. Still not sure if I want to pony-up for the Proxmox Community support, especially after I add a couple more host machines next month, but folks gotta eat I guess...
Luckily, I run Proxmox on my homelab, despite the temptation to learn more about hypervisors/VMs from the formerly free offerings from VMware. Still not sure if I want to pony-up for the Proxmox Community support, especially after I add a couple more host machines next month, but folks gotta eat I guess...
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They get their slice of the pie up front. Why would they care about the long term health of the company/industry? Same thing you see in other areas. Enshitification indeed.
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This feels like Broadcom's new pricing is really saying they just don't want their smaller customers. Better to have lots of revenue from a few larger companies that have less support costs overall than to have to support the smaller companies too.
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Leo Getz said it best:
"They f*** you at the drive-thru, okay? They f*** you at the drive-thru! They know you're gonna be miles away before you find out you got f***ed! They know you're not gonna turn around and go back, they don't care."
"They f*** you at the drive-thru, okay? They f*** you at the drive-thru! They know you're gonna be miles away before you find out you got f***ed! They know you're not gonna turn around and go back, they don't care."
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I just switched my whole companies VM's from ESXi to Proxmox. ovftool for the win!
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Loved VMWare fusion for Mac since version 1. We are now at 13.5. I hope they keep doing it. But why would Broadcom give a f... about Mac desktop virtualisation ?
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Their pricing is only about 10% under VMware's new pricing. Not that exciting really.
Nutanix looks like a good fit for some K8s workloads but I'm not convinced moving due to VMware pricing is worth it.
Moving out of principle on the other hand....
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I’ve been working with the IT team that handles the on prem hardware for my group (DevOps for our SaaS platform) to figure out a migration path, most of our deployment is cloud-based but we still have a relatively large on-prem vsphere footprint for internal tooling. Enterprise company with 10s of millions of customers on the platform I work on and while the rest of the company has a larger vsphere footprint than we do we’ll basically pull them along because our tooling has to be certified for several audit types, so the IT folks that handle hardware arent going to want a split. Overall the company is a huge customer that they’re likely to lose shortly.
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Never underestimate the allure of short-term gains. It's the only thing that matters to the M&A crowd.
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It's especially annoying as right now they aren't many high quality virtualisation apps for Apple Silicon, and VMWare has just gone through the effort to bring Fusion there.
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Something that's also not discussed in the open is that broadcom is also forecing the major customers to get direct but also forced to move ALL their licences to a full VCloud Foundation stack. Even if they only need regular vsphere standard.
So on top on increase in price and subscription shift, add a ton of useless junk in the products and you get a x8 increase in price.
No wonder everyone is looking for a way out.
And for people that aren't yet looking, do it fast because switching take a bit of time...
So on top on increase in price and subscription shift, add a ton of useless junk in the products and you get a x8 increase in price.
No wonder everyone is looking for a way out.
And for people that aren't yet looking, do it fast because switching take a bit of time...
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NSX and Aria are definitely not junk if you are operating at any type of scale, I'd argue Aria is a critical component once you hit about 300 VMs if they aren't all IT managed. HCX needed work (but considering everyone got laid off, I suspect that it won't be appreciably improved from its current state). Tanzu is useless if you have a dedicated DevOps team that knows what they are doing but is alright if you are just getting started down that path and having your IT infrastructure engineers try to manage it. vSAN was great because you could buy the licenses for the hosts and jam just about as much storage as you'd like into your cluster, new licensing model (100GB per core and then additional spend required) is maybe set high enough that most people won't hit it... Not sure... But keeping with the theme of this acquisition, they missed the value prop for most people and changed the licensing model to be like everyone (any major SAN provider with a OpEx model, Nutanix, etc) else.
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Broadcom, as a chip maker, has always been a B2B company. You don't go to Best Buy or Micro Center to buy a "Broadcom" device, you buy a Raspberry Pi, a Gigabyte-branded Wi-Fi card, a laptop, etc. which just happens to have a Broadcom chip on it. VMware's tech stack included and supported both B2B as well as direct purchase, even down to the individual user with Workstation/Player and ESXi Free. All that Broadcom is doing is trying to force the square pegs on VMware into the round holes of Broadcom's business model.
To be fair, on the flip side, VMware was already fighting against the breadth of open source and alternative offerings for virtualization. On most Windows and Apple machines, all that their software does nowadays is offer essentially a GUI and a couple support components (virtual disk/network/USB handling, etc.) on top of the OS and hardware provided virtualization stack. (Who remembers the early WSL2 days: "you have to disable WSL2 to use VMware, and vice versa..." It was almost better to just dual-boot for a while.) I view VMware as sort of like the IBM PC of virtualization - VMware did much of the work to innovate and make x86 virtualization possible (even before hardware support was even a consideration), and for that they earned their name a place in history. However, much like how IBM exited the consumer PC market despite having been its inventor, I kinda see this acquisition as VMware cashing out while the getting is good. Ultimately, Broadcom will be forced to depend entirely on very large accounts, which do indeed make a lot of money, but they will likely struggle to get new accounts going forward.
(Although I guess that strategy seems to be working for Oracle sadly... I know of very few orgs that will actively choose Oracle technologies up front, yet they're still hanging on by basically living off their B2B accounts. Oh yeah, and suing people over method signatures.)
Nonetheless, I now also find it quite necessary to steer everyone I know away from VMware.
And also:
You know, a saying my mom once told me comes to mind. Something about my friends and a bridge.
What that sentence really should read is "VMware's end-user-friendly practices didn't align with our existing business model, therefore things needed to change so that we don't have to adapt."
To be fair, on the flip side, VMware was already fighting against the breadth of open source and alternative offerings for virtualization. On most Windows and Apple machines, all that their software does nowadays is offer essentially a GUI and a couple support components (virtual disk/network/USB handling, etc.) on top of the OS and hardware provided virtualization stack. (Who remembers the early WSL2 days: "you have to disable WSL2 to use VMware, and vice versa..." It was almost better to just dual-boot for a while.) I view VMware as sort of like the IBM PC of virtualization - VMware did much of the work to innovate and make x86 virtualization possible (even before hardware support was even a consideration), and for that they earned their name a place in history. However, much like how IBM exited the consumer PC market despite having been its inventor, I kinda see this acquisition as VMware cashing out while the getting is good. Ultimately, Broadcom will be forced to depend entirely on very large accounts, which do indeed make a lot of money, but they will likely struggle to get new accounts going forward.
(Although I guess that strategy seems to be working for Oracle sadly... I know of very few orgs that will actively choose Oracle technologies up front, yet they're still hanging on by basically living off their B2B accounts. Oh yeah, and suing people over method signatures.)
Nonetheless, I now also find it quite necessary to steer everyone I know away from VMware.
And also:
You know, a saying my mom once told me comes to mind. Something about my friends and a bridge.
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They want to sell off the consumer product segment, reportedly for $5B. So most likely they will keep it somehow updated till someone buys it from them.
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Boy, that's just silly pricing. Rewriting new desktop virtualization from scratch, even with tons of features, could surely be done for less than $250 million.
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Just that Broadcom doesn't push its customers to the cloud. They are pushing them into subscriptions. Which is a different thing.
I assume the SKU you're thinking off is the standalone Hyper-V Server edition, but if you think that was the only change then you're not paying attention. Some time ago, Microsoft has shifted most internal resources working on virtualization from Hyper-V to Azure Stack HCI, and this is where all the development has been happening for a while now while Hyper-V is mostly seeing bug fixes. The planned GPU virtualization replacement for RemoteFX has been canceled (MS now wants you to use GPU passthrough via DDA instead), as have other Hyper-V features in the pipeline.
The only reason why Microsoft hasn't yet EOL'd Hyper-V is that Azure Stack HCI is still a building site and parts of Hyper-V are used for desktop virtualization on Windows 11 and as part of its security products. But there is no future for Hyper-V on Windows Server.
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Yeah, we renewed our perpetual license for another 3 years last summer.
But we’re actively researching how to get off VMware before those three years are up.
In corporate IT, reliability and trust is king.
And unfortunately, we can’t trust VMware anymore…somit has to go
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That's mostly nonsense as it's's really only the Apple Silicon variant of Fusion which relies on elements of macOS virtualization stack. Fusion for intel Macs and Workstation for Windows and Linux all have used VMware's own virtualization stack, and still do to this day.
This aside, the market for desktop virtualization has been a tiny fraction of that for server virtualization, and this has been this way for many years. Workstation and Fusion for intel Macs only really still exist because of their use as VM building tools for server deployments.
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And because they can leverage the server hypervisor technologies instead of having to have a completely separate codebase. The idea that the desktop tools can be spun off to a different company and continue to be viable products is... not one that I'm minded to believe is plausible.
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Having used Fusion for years, but the last version I had a license for only supporting Intel Macs, I went Parallels for my new M2 Pro a year ago. (My first Apple Silicon machine) I can’t remember all the reasons, but Broadcom buying VMWare was definitely one of them. But generally I’ve found it just as good as Fusion ever was.
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And Verge.io, and Scalelogic, and sundry others. And my own employer, as we provide consulting and implementation services in this space (including with Nutanix). Especially as the hardware requirements for vSphere 8 mean MANY of our clients need to do a hardware refresh, might as well just stand up that whole new cluster running something else. Every alternative has pretty good migration tools from VMware. Going the OTHER way is a lot more painful.
I really, truly do not understand what Broadcom is thinking here. They are literally going to kill the golden goose in short order. VMware tried to change their licensing model some years ago when they tried to license RAM as well as CPU and the backlash was horrific - and back then there was nothing like the alternatives there are today. They backed off from that. And realistically, the issue isn't really going to subscription-based licensing per se. For all intents and purposes, enterprise clients are already paying a subscription due to the need to pay for support. Nobody with a brain runs unsupported software as mission-critical as the hypervisor. The problem is that the cost is going up an insane amount - from our clients I am hearing 3x typically. And it's not like VMware was cheap to start with. That is excellent motivation to change to something else, even with all the pain that entails.
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Our VMware partner is HPE and we've been informed Broadcom's pricing has jumped 1,000%. That's not a typo.
So naturally we're looking at other options. What a
move on their part.
So naturally we're looking at other options. What a
move on their part.
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Sadly nobody can really compete with ESXi right now, at least not in the Enterprise space. Where I work, we're considering different options, and will probably end up going with a couple alternatives that fit different use cases, some on-prem and some cloud hosted, and even a couple traditional baremetal systems.
Broadcom just doesn't seem trustworthy at this point, so we're positioning to dump them and not just Vmware products, but their entire portfolio of hardware too.
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I don’t know how much a brand new virtualisation stack would cost, but a substantial part of the value of VMware fusion would be the licences and documentation required to ensure compatibility with existing VMs without being buried in Broadcom lawyers.
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